Glenn Beck on the CNN 'Pit of Despair' and Why He Got Out of Cable TV

Glenn Beck thinks the television industry as we know it is dying, but that's not why he left it to start his own digital network, The Blaze. He's making a lot more money now than he did at
Fox News, but that wasn't it either. He left to save his soul.

"If you stay in it too long, you become Norma Desmond," Beck said Friday during an appearance at the NYU Stern School of Business, where he accepted a Disruptive Innovation Award from the Tribeca Film Festival. "I remember feeling, 'If you do not leave now, you won't leave with your soul intact.'"

Beck recalled one of his last conversations with Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, his boss for two and a half years. While several accounts have suggested Ailes was anxious to be rid of the controversial host, Beck says Ailes challenged his desire to walk away.

"At the end, when we were leaving, it was a long process," he said. "Roger said to me, 'You're not going to leave.' And I said, 'I am.' And he said, 'Nobody does,' meaning leave television....And I said, 'I'm fortunate because I haven't been in it that long.' I knew what this big, huge Fox empire brought to the table, and I had to leave before I became too enamored of that."

Before coming to Fox, Beck worked at CNN, where, he said, he had an office that looked out on an open-plan office area where producers and reporters had their desks. "I used to call it the Pit of Despair because there are all these people plunking out stories like, 'I just want to hang myself, I just want to hang myself,'" he said.*

Among his frustrations at both networks, he said, was the rigid, formulaic thinking about how to produce a talk show. "Most of what we do on television was developed by Desi Arnaz" in the 1950s, he said. "There's no reason we still do it that way, except that it works. It drives me out of my mind that they are still using what's called the Desi shoot, three cameras on the floor."

For Beck, who loves to amble around as he talks, it was an unwanted constraint. "I moved, and they couldn't follow me," he said. "I said to them, 'Get me a sports director, please. Get someone with experience producing sports. Just tell them I'm carrying a ball. I think they can do it.' But everybody in news was saying, 'You're supposed to stay here.'"

"All of media is like that," he added. "It has a system. But it's not 1953 anymore. I knew that to be true when I worked at CNN, and Fox isn't any better."

Beck's interviewer, Aryeh Bourkoff of the investment bank LionTree, asked him what he'd do if he were in charge of one of the cable news networks now. "I don't know because I haven't seriously thought about it, except that I'd fire a lot of people," he said. "A lot of people."

*Correction: An earlier version of this post quoted Beck saying the "Pit of Despair" was at Fox News. In fact, he was talking about his time at CNN when he made that remark. I've corrected both the article and the headline to reflect that.

I've been covering the business of news, information and entertainment in one form or another for more than 10 years. In February 2014, I moved to San Francisco to cover the tech beat. My primary focus is social media and digital media, but I'm interested in other aspects, i...